The Natural History of Selborne

Planted potatoes & beans in the meadow-garden.  Much thunder & hail at Alton.

Set the old Bantam speckled Hen with eleven eggs.  My cook-maid desired there might be an odd egg for good luck: … numero Deus impare gaudet.

A boy has taken three little young Squirrels in their nest, or drey, as it is called in these parts.  These small creatures he put under the care of a cat who had lately lost her kittens, & finds that she nurses & suckles them with the same assiduity & affection, as if they were her own offspring.  This circumstance corroborates my suspicion, that the mention of deserted & exposed children being nurtured by female beasts of prey who had lost their young, may not be so improbable an incident as many have supposed: — & therefore may be a justification of those authors who have gravely mentioned what some have deemed to be a wild & improbable story.  So many people went to see the little squirrels suckled by a cat, that the foster mother became jealous of her charge, & in pain for their safety; & therefore hid them over the ceiling, where one died.  This circumstance shews her affection for these foundling, & that she supposes the squirrels to be her own young.  The hens, when they have hatched ducklings, are equally attached to them as if they were their own chickens.  For a leveret nursed by a cat see my Nat: History, p. 214.  I have said “that it is not one whit more marvellous that Romulus, & Remus, in their infant & exposed state, should be nursed by a she wolf, than that a poor little suckling leveret should be fostered & cherished by a bloody grimalkin.”

Deeps snow at Selborne: five inches deep!  Red-starts, Fly-catchers, & Black-caps arrive.  If these little delicate beings are birds of passage (as we have reason to suppose they are, because they are never seen in winter) how could they, feeble as they seem, bear up, against such storms of snow & rain; & make their way thro’ such meteorous turbulencies, as one should suppose would embarrass & retard the most hardy & resolute of the winged nation?  Yet they keep their appointed times & seasons, & in spite of frosts & winds return to their stations periodically , as if they had met with nothing to obstruct them.  The withdrawing & appearance of the short-winged summer birds is a very puzzling circumstance in natural History!

Mary White left us.

Thames very full & beautiful, after so much dry weather: wheat looks well; meadows dry, & scorched; roads very dusty.

Young goslings on the common.

Sharp, cutting wind!  Heath-fire in the forest makes a great smoke.

Nightingales heard in honey-lane.

“The Nightingall, that chaunteth all the springe,/
Whose warblinge notes throughout the wooddes are harde,/
Beinge kepte in cage, she ceaseth for to singe,/
And mourns, bicause her libertie is barde.”
— Geffrey Whitney’s Emblemes: 1586, p.81

Sharp, & biting wind.  Some crude oranges were put in a hot cupboard in order that the heat might mellow them, & render them better flavoured: but the crickets got to them, & gnawing holes thro’ the rind, sucked out all the juice, & devoured all the pulp.